Earlier this year three key MySpace executives jumped ship only two months before the company’s major reorg. Since then they’ve been pretty quiet — we’ve learned that they raised a $10 million funding round led by August Capital and Redpoint Ventures, but aside from that there hasn’t been much to go on. Now, more details are starting to emerge: we know that the company will be called Blue Rover Labs, and we’ve gotten our first glimpse of the homepage.
Earlier this afternoon each of the team members tweeted out a link to Blue Rover Labs at approximately the same time, with no explanation given. The page is quite sparse, with little on it other than a list of the current staff. The three MySpace execs, Amit Kapur (former MySpace COO), Steve Pearman (former MySpace SVP Product Strategy) and Jim Benedetto (former MySpace VP Technology) have apparently brought on Kunal Anand, a former MySpace Senior Technical Lead (and later, Grockit Engineer) as a fourth member.
The company describes itself as a “well-funded stealth internet startup”, and includes a note telling us that it’s happening “right now” and to “stay tuned for exciting news”. There’s also a link to a hiring page, where the company writes that it’s looking for “PHP ninjas, LAMP architects, memcached gurus, rock-star product managers, UX/UI experts, and other swiss-army-knife hackers”.
That’s about all we know so far, but it sounds like more details will be coming soon. We’re optimistic about this team, and eager to see what they come up with.
So guys, are we really writing about mystery teams now instead of actual products?
I hear there are some promising young lads over Los Gatos High School who aced their computer science final. Sounds like a promising story lead to me.
Use your platform to cover real, scrappy companies making a difference for their users….not vaporware.
P.S. I will be extremely surprised if this comment sees the light of day as others have disappeared down the memory hole. Of course that fact might make interesting Twitter fodder.
good point CE…i agree…there are at least 2-4 start up that get funded a day but techcrunch only likes to mention the following on a daily basis…
google
gmail
twitter
and so forth…
it must be the pr machine at google that techcruch makes a living from.
add fakebook aka plaxo the list above too.
Anything else would be outside their level of expertise. They follow hype, it’s very pavlog’s dog, they just can’t help it.
I really hope they come up with something better than facebook. I’m tired of Facebook being popular
looking forward to see what product was worthy of a
10 million investment
From working with the- I can personally say they are all amazing. It definately should be good.
trying to get a job? hehe
i concur…
lol php.
lol lol.
lol php developers.
good luck trying to find PHP ninjas, LAMP architects, memcached gurus, rock-star product managers, UX/UI experts in Santa Monica…when are people going to realize that Los Angeles is about lifestyle, not building big technology companies.
Not to mention that it is the a-hole of the earth and anyone with half a brain wouldn’t want to live there. And this is coming from a former resident of the Peoples Republic of Santa Monica.
it’s a sad fact that all transplants with money try and locate towards the beach – thus tech companies and their employees with some money end up in santa monica, and the rest end up in the south bay.
Subject: PHP Developer – N1
To HR:
My resume is in your inbox. I don’t like being on work share.
PHP? didn’t these guys learn anything from myspace?
myspace was coldfusion and now .net.
James, had to much to drink? or are you just trying to be stupid?
Beit PHP or Coldfusion the thing is OPen source rules and I doubt MySpace will ever change its code to .NET, why wud any one do it anyway
Vardaan,
You might want to check the site before you make uninformed comments like this. MySpace is mainly .Net code.
Where do you see .net? everything looks .cfm to me
So excited for the guys!
If you’re in LA and are even considering to work with these guys, don’t even hesitate, do it and do it now. You’ll be working with an amazing team and will have fun building what I know will be big..
another example of someone kissing ass/up
So these guys disappear for a couple months, and they think they have the next big thing? If innovation worked liked that, all desperate people would become millionaires.
The $10 million is for the reputation.. and not the product. So.. watch out guys.
Dude, do you have any idea how VC/PE investment works? VC’s look at 75% team profile and 25% idea.
A great team can implement a shit idea
A shit team can’t implement a great idea
@SanJay Sharma, I think it’s fair to say they were cooking something up way before they left. Also they’re not coming to market yet so your “couple of months” glib comment doesn’t stand. Conversely, it doesn’t take *that* long to get an idea off the ground.
I’ve worked with all these guys, including Kunal, and they’re smart folks. I too am excited to see what they come out with.
@Ben, we will see. As somebody who lives in LA, I hope they are successful simply to help steal some valley thunder.
Regarding your comment on how VC investment works, isn’t this the same “model” that many people say is broken because of poor aggregate ROI, and is often criticized because of herd mentality? Not many people get this type of funding without some tangible traction, especially 10M. So, unless we’re talking about cold fusion or a back-scratching, hair-cutting, ukulele-tuning, nose-picking machine, I’d say its LARGLY driven by the team.
(@David, I may have miss-read your comment, but the above point still stands – it’s a great team that deserves the money assuming the idea is even only half-baked)
we all see where myspace is heading , how come these guys couldn’t innovate there.. I’m skeptical.
Word… Deadpool.
LAMP Architects? I can screw in a light bulb damn well!
Why is this a story?? There’s no website, no product, the only thing I’ve learned is some fat cat MySpace people are starting a new “mystery” project. What a half assed job of “reporting.” It’s becoming more and more apparent that this site must be reporting on start-ups headed up by Friends and insiders.
As the first poster said, there are probably 100 startups that send you press releases every day that actually have a product that don’t get covered.
So I’d really like to know what your criteria is to get covered and featured beyond just being a Tech Insider.
These kind of posts doesn’t do anyone any good, the old adage first impressions are important, I would have no further interest in anything this company has to offer because their “website” is pretty crappy.
Michelle, sadly I don’t believe it is about what is interesting anymore. By my rough estimate, TC’s articles are now 20% interesting true startup coverage, 20% Twitter, 10% Facebook, 10% Google, and 40% filler.
Why filler? Because they know that the 20% that is interesting will carry the 80% that is ho-hum. This isn’t about being interesting, it is about driving pageviews and selling advertising.
So, TC has 12 ads on this page. Some are probably CPM, some are probably fixed price. Let’s assume a blanket CPM of $5.
$5 CPM * 12 ads on page = $60 Aggregate CPM
This article already has 30 comments. Assume that readers outnumber commenters 100:1. This means 3000 readers.
3000 pageviews * $60 CPM = $180
Jason is a good writer and is probably paid decently….let’s say $60k/year or about $30/hr. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say it took an hour to write -> $30. Tack on another $10 for infrastructure and another $20 for other overhead.
$30 + $10 + $20 = $60 cost
$120 profit on a $60 investment with almost immediate payback sounds pretty damn good to me in this economy.
Even assuming I’m off by 50% on my ad estimates, we’re still talking $30 profit on $60 investment. Even that isn’t too shabby.
While as a reader, I hate it, I have to admit that I would certainly be favoring volume over quality too. This is exactly the problem when blogs try to become big business…they do it at the expense of their readers time and attention.
Just my $.02.
I don’t think he is publishing 8 articles per day. So,
240 + 10 + 20 = 270, 180 – 270 = (90)
Hmmm
Who looks at ads? I block every one of them.
whatever they are doing im sure it is already being done or could be executed in days by an established media player.
choosing the rigt domain name may be the most important decision they will make. we all know the power of “My”. personalized natural language url location.
maybe i take myspac for granite but i dont see alot of creativity from the site. i did notice the creative ad financing payments from Googl.
it is very late in the game to launch a startup period. the market is bear and flooded. the end of digital media innovation is here (twitter anyone?). we dont need another startup or website for anything. we have enough to work with. the current opportunity is in niche channel natural language social location and discovery. 3 guys and the right social media platform and the skys the limit.
TeamLocator.com – assembly required
“we all know the power of “My”. personalized natural language url location.”
What does this mean? Do you foolishly think that if you put “my” in front of a URL you have cracked the code on genius?
So, if I put “my” in front of Facebook, it would be more useful. How about MyGoogle? Or I know, maybe MyMapquest.
Now you’ve done it! Each of these services now makes sense. Thank you so much yet another brilliant post.
Now go away, idiot.
The super-secret “stealth mode” startup paradigm should be taken out behind the garage and shot.
If you are building an anti-gravity device, fine. If you are building yet another social network/real-time search/vanity microblogging service, then your super-secret mode is a bunch of bullshit so get real and cut out the “we’re so cool because we’re *stealthy* crap.
So they worked for Myspace. That’s a reason not to give them money. It means they’ll develop a popular product, then sit on their asses while competitors take them to the cleaners, watcth the product stagnate and then bail.
The bio links on the BRL home page are exactly the same ones used in this TechCrunch post… Is there a relationship between the two pages?
I think Stealth Startup is overrated.
All you do is create an echo chamber and increase your chances of achieving failure.
Get a product out there asap, incorporate a customer feedback loop and run with it.
A talented team like this should have no problems leveraging this approach.
“rock-star product managers” — because rocking out on Guitar Hero almost makes you a “rock-star.”
myspace spammed every one to get them signup…but after that they don’t know what to do…that is the difference between facebook x myspace…facebook tricked every one to signup, now they know how to play the game
everyone says these guys are smart, but the reality is myspace is declining, declining fast…we wouldn’t even think of myspace in one/two years…just like how we forgot yahoo to do search things!!
Potentially breaking news on what Blue Rover Labs is working on here:
http://www.tren...funded-startup/